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1.3.2-Kingedmundsroyalmurder
Brick!club chapter 2: of young women, young men, and attractive body parts More plot! Or, rather, more slight tangents that are setting up for plot. Given that this tangent is mostly about ladies I am a-okay with this. (It also is a lot about Hugo’s Opinions About Ladies, which I am much less okay with.) "étudier à Paris, c’est naître à Paris." (To study in Paris is to be born in Paris.) I’m not sure why I like this bit so much, I just do. I love the idea of cities adopting their students, of an identity chosen rather than bestowed by birth. It doesn’t matter where you were born, if you come to Paris to study then the city accepts you as its own. (There’s also issues of class: if you’re born in Paris but can’t study there are you still of Paris? If you go to work but not to study are you adopted? Is it a rich student thing? I live in Boulder and there’s kind of that sense, though not as much. Living and studying in Boulder definitely allows you to tell others that Boulder is your city, though not your hometown. The city is super student-friendly, since it’s a university town, so you’re expected to be there temporarily, to weave Boulder into your identity when you’re there and then pull it out bits at a time after you leave. And I’m going to stop because I could go on about cities and identity and impermanence all day.) "beaux de ce charmant avril qu’on appelle vingt ans." (pretty with that charming April that we call twenty-years-old.) Maybe I just like this because I too am twenty years old, but it’s a cool turn of phrase. So these four boys/young men/not so young men are supposed to be standins for the everyman, basically? They don’t really get any fleshing out, with the exception of Felix, and even he doesn’t get a whole lot of characterization, just a physical description and a couple personality traits. I know they’re bit characters, but still. "Blachevelle aimait Favourite, ainsi nommée parce qu’elle était allée en Angleterre; Listolier adorait Dahlia, qui avait pris pour nom de guerre un nom de fleur; Fameuil idolâtrait Zéphine, abrégé de Joséphine; Tholomyès avait Fantine, dite la Blonde à cause de ses beaux cheveux couleur de soleil." (Blachevelle loved Favourite, called that because she’d been to England; Listolier adored Dahlia, who took as war name the name of a flower; Fameuil idolized Zephine, short for Josephine; Tholomyes had Fantine, called the Blonde because of her pretty hair the color of sunshine.) Can I just talk about verbs here for a second? On the one hand, okay, Hugo didn’t want to be repetitive. On the other, look at the verbs we get: loved (alternatively it could be liked, since in French the two are the same word and you get your meaning based on context), adored, idolized, had. One of these things is not like the others. I know it’s not supposed to be anything serious between any of them save Fantine’s adoration of Tholomyes, but the other three imply either affection or at the very least respect for the women. The partnerships seem to be implied to be more equal, as opposed to Tholomyes who is literally said to possess Fantine. Anyway. We then get Hugo describing the four and it kind of makes me mad because Hugo shouldn’t be allowed to write about women without some kind of external (preferably strong-willed female) guidance. Dude is way too caught up in purity and weakness and shallowness. And yeah, he’s a product of his time, but still. Looking past the irritating way they’re described, I like these women, Favourite especially. Twenty-three was older then than it was now if I’m understanding right, and Favourite has the look of a woman who’s seen a lot and isn’t going to let the get to her any more than she has to. (Honestly she and Tholomyes seem like a better match, but I suspect Tholomyes zeroed in on Fantine due to her innocence and idealism (and purity?)). I wonder if Favourite, Dahlia, and Zephine were friends before they met the boys. The text mentions that the latter two are great admirers of Favourite’s, and I’m curious to see how far back that goes. We get the sense that they’re not actually super great friends (I am resisting the urge to make them friends in headcanon and create an AU where they take in Fantine and help her raise Cosette and life is better) but I want more about their relationships to each other as well as the boys. Dahlia has pretty nails. Good for her? And the only options for her are to destroy them working or sell her virtue? Moderation Hugo. Life is not all a game of extremes. "Elle était la seule des quatre qui ne fût tutoyée que par un seul." (Fantine was the only one of the four who was called tu by only one person.) I assume this is a reference to the fact that Tholomyes is the only man she’s loved/slept with. But that means the girls don’t call each other tu, or at least the other three don’t use it on Fantine, which is definite proof that they’re not that close. (Do the Amis use tu, does anyone know? I’ve always assumed they did but maybe not.) More about Fantine’s hair and teeth. Hugo’s not good at this subtle foreshadowing thing, is he? "Iron est un mot anglais qui veut dire fer. Serait-ce de là que viendrait ironie?" (Iron is an English word that means iron. Would it be from there that one gets irony?) I assume Hugo is being clever here rather than actually attempting linguistics. It’s a fun play on words (out of curiosity, how is it translated?) but it doesn’t really *mean* anything. Unless he’s implying that in order to be properly ironic one must be as unyielding in mind and ideas as iron? Also, Tholomyes is ugly and makes up for that by being rich and also entertaining. Fair enough. Maybe it’s that I’ve been writing too many fics lately, but damn does he remind me of an amalgam of James Potter and Sirius Black (but ugly, so maybe post-Azkaban Sirius). Cynical, prone to fairly cruel practical jokes without consideration for the thoughts of the victim, leader of a group, charismatic, popular, selfish, seemingly frivolous… Of course Tholomyes never grows out of this, whereas James and Sirius (mostly) do. (And you may now throw things at me for saying mean things about the Marauders.) Commentary Sarah1281 I don’t think even post-Azkaban Sirius reaches Felix-level ugliness. It’s really interesting that your edition says that only one person called Fantine ‘tu’ and mine says “She alone, of all the four, was not called “thou” by a single one of them.’ They both mean that they weren’t all super-close but this one implies that not even her lover acts like he’s that close to her and sort of makes her come off as even more foolish and naive for not taking the name cues. But she loves him and hers is a yielding nature so he might have been able to tell her he was in it for the sex and still get the sex. I don’t know how the translation could possibly be so different in this case, though, because it seems like if she was not called something or called something by one person those words would not be the same. I hadn’t noticed that the other boys were shown to at least greatly like their girlfriends and with Felix it’s “and he was dating Fantine”, pretty much. That is really relevant, I think. Kingedmundsroyalmurder (reply to Sarah1281) No, I suspect he didn’t, though I don’t think he was quite as pretty as Gary Oldman either. That is interesting and strange. I was reading through the tag before I posted and I saw several people saying that she wasn’t called tu by anyone, so I went back and reread mine super carefully to see if it was some weird grammatical thing that I was missing. But apparently it was just a translation error/change. Maybe the translators are even less subtle than Hugo and think we need more indications of how terrible the boyfriend is? I wonder if she would give him sex for the sake of sex. Hugo goes on and on about her purity and her true love for the guy and she only slept with him because she loved him. I assume she knows it’s not reciprocated, but would she let him come out and say, “this is just for the sex sweetheart, lie down and think of Patria now.” On the other hand, if that is what happened, then that would feed into her later prostitution arc and feelings and terrible humiliation (is that all I’m good for, even the man I loved saw me only as a whore, etc.) And yeah. I would love to know more about the dynamics of the other three couples.